ABSTRACT
The combination of work and counseling served not only to uncover some of the roots of the author's anger, but also to lessen much of it. The counseling in particular deepened author's appreciation of Freud and the neo-Freudians, and author studied their work as avidly as he had studied Marx. The author soon saw that the issue of motivation—of what moved people to act or not to act—so critical yet poorly understood a part of Marxist thought, was being developed by the Freudians with great insight. The poor in his caseload were what Marx called the "lumpen proletariat"—the "foolish proletariat", foolish because they were not wage earners. The older caseworkers called them the hard-core poor and many were certain their lot could never be improved. Some of the senior caseworkers believed sterilization was the only effective way of ridding the state and county of their care.
